The Location of Culture (Routledge Classics)

triumph of the colonialist moment in early English Evangelism and modern English literature. The discovery of the book installs the sign of appropriate representation: the word of God, truth, art creates the conditions for a beginning, a practice of history and narrative. But the institution of the Word in the wilds is also an Entstellung, a proces

From the point of view of the colonizer, passionate for unbounded, unpeopled possession, the problem of truth turns into the troubled political and psychic question of boundary and territory: Tell us why you, the native, are there.

Both colonizer and colonized are in a process of miscognition where each point of identification is always a partial and double repetition of the otherness of the self – democrat and despot, individual and servant, native and child.

the strategic splitting of the colonial discourse – less than one and double – is contained by addressing the other as despot.

in asserting the natural rights of empire, Mill’s proposal implicitly erases all that is taken as ‘second nature’ within Western civility.

these doubly inscribed figures face two ways without being two-faced. Western imperialist discourse continually puts under erasure the civil state, as the colonial text emerges uncertainly within its narrative of progress.

Between the Western sign and its colonial signification there emerges a map of misreading that embarrasses the righteousness of recordation and its certainty of good government.

‘Be the father and the oppressor … just and unjust’ is a mode of contradictory utterance that ambivalently reinscribes, across differential power relations, both colonizer and colonized.

a specific colonial temporality and textuality of that space between enunciation and address.